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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2231 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

previous year or in the years to come; it is as if the goals that we want to achieve in education will somehow self-sustain; and it is as if everybody understands that these generalities, as worded in the outcome, of providing people with essential skills and helping equip them for further education, will happen of their own accord.

Let me give some examples of what I am on about and see whether perhaps we can address them better in this budget area. For instance, anybody listening to the education debates of the last couple of years would have heard a lot about special education; about alternative programs like SWOW, which is sort of special education but not really; about the inclusion of children with disabilities in programs; and about the expense of special schools and their role in society. In the last year, we have heard a lot - again, driven by Dr Kemp, more than locally - about literacy. I will come back to literacy. We have heard a lot about sport; we have heard a lot about violence in schools; the Minister has a new advisory council; we have heard a lot about equity issues; we have the new schools program being battered, through the efforts of Dr Kemp; we have heard a lot about teachers and their needs for professional education; we have heard over the years a lot about high schools; we have heard a lot of talk about ongoing educational needs which used to be provided by evening college and which have now moved to the CIT; we have heard a lot about college reforms; we have heard a lot about school closures -12 key issues that have been part of very active debate in the community and in the Assembly. If you look at these papers, it is as if none of that has ever happened and these things are happening outside of how ordinary education is delivered. That is not necessarily wrong because, in many instances, these issues have not attracted new funding or old funding or do not have a specific budget item.

It seems to me to be a problem that if there are issues of concern that should be dealt with within the education system - and, to be fair, probably are being dealt with there - we see no evidence of that in the most public and important of the public policy areas of government, that being the budget. We see the overarching motherhood statement about what education is trying to do. We see in the detailed pages the various targets that have been set and, in some cases, whether or not they have been achieved. But again we do not come back, it seems to me, sufficiently to: What are we trying to achieve; how are we dealing with issues; what are our priorities; do we have changing priorities that have emerged over the year?

With the output classes, the quantity and the target measures that we have - although we get a good ongoing flow of how schools are working, how parents are responding and how the system is responding - I am not satisfied that they are dealing in any way with new priorities and changes. I will be very interested to see over the years whether this method of accounting - and I am not critical of the method - is continued. What I am suggesting is that governments can get away with an awful lot by having these output measures, by having these targets and by having everything clearly defined. All it does is define the status quo and the structure of things as they are. It gives us no measure of whether any of the real concerns that are raised from year to year have been dealt with and no qualitative measure of how the system is changing, adapting and coping.

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